Speech by Krzysztof Czubaszek, Ph.D.

Ladies and Gentlemen

In the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw, on the occasion of the recently inaugurated jubilee of the 65th anniversary of this institution, a classical art of Yiddish literature, “The Dybbuk” by Szymon An-ski, interpreted by an outstanding director Maia Kleczewska, was presented. In this prewar drama about a girl haunted by the demon-like spirit of her prematurely deceased beloved, who is the title dybbuk, the author of the show saw the metaphor of the murdered Jewish nation who demands from us, the living, we lent them his voice. As dybbuk was shouting out of the girl’s mouth his pain and grief after losing the most important of what he had: life and great love; like he, not wanting to go to the afterlife, latched onto someone else’s body - so those who were brutally deprived of everything: loved ones, homes, the right to a dignified existence, and finally the very existence; those who were arbitrarily excluded beyond the humanity and erased from the landscape of Europe, our country, cities and villages; those whose centuries-old spiritual and material achievements were trampled and destroyed; those after whom even graves or memory didn’t remain - they just expect us to become their voice, to speak about their suffering, loneliness, death, but also normal lives, joys and concerns, issues important and trivial. They cry out to us from the depths of the mass graves, fields and forests, where their remains are scattered, they come to us as dybbuks who cannot part with this world because they are kept here by unsettled bills, lives not lived till the end.

The Jews of Lukow and its neighbouring places, who were exterminated in Shoah, also wanted to speak, also for decades sought someone to whom they could cling as dybbuks and turn into a word. Because word has executive power, because it was the gospel beginning, and yet the Gospels are texts which grew from the Jewish culture. So they sought, but noone seemed to be interested in their unfinished lives. Their spirits circled the town, which for many centuries was also their home, but not even a stone stayed there after it. And again, as in the Gospel, they came to their own - former neighbours, friends, classmates - and their own did not recognize them.

I do not know if anyone heard those voices from the afterlife, or those who met dybbuks on their way dismissed them where they came from. But finally they managed to reach someone. Otherwise there would not be an exhibition commemorating the history of the Jewish community of Lukow organized in 2007 by the Regional Museum of Lukow. I was just collecting materials for a book on this subject, so I could contribute to the preparations of the exhibition and develop a special edition of “The Notebooks of Lukow” entirely devoted to the history of the Jewish diaspora in Lukow. A year later my book “The Jews of Lukow and its Vicinity” was published. In 2011 I launched a website www.zydzi.lukow.pl on the basis of my publication which web page I am constantly expanding.

In parallel with the publication of the book I made efforts not to limit the remembrance of the doomed half of the city’s population only to the intellectual dimension but to adopt it into a material form, speaking to a wide audience. The project assumed the introduction of memorials into the public space. The first was a plaque which I founded in 2012. It was hung where until the end of the war the Lukow town hall was situated. On its courtyard Germans committed mass murders of the Jews from the local ghetto. At least several hundred people, including many women and small children, died there.

Several century history of the Jews of Lukow was not only a martyrdom but also, and perhaps above all, an ordinary life. Here they were born, they grew up, learned in cheders and public schools, started families, ran shops and workshops and went to the synagogue to pray to the God of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac - the same God to whom their Polish neighbours submitted their requests in the churches. Although they shared their religious doctrines, although they were sometimes competitors, yet Poles and Jews were Polish citizens who, when it was necessary, served hand in hand in the ranks of the Polish army to defend the common homeland. That was back in 1939 when the call for mobilization reached the inhabitants of Lukow regardless of their nationality or religion. Today among us are guests from Israel, the descendants of Reuven Wajsbaum, the citizen of Lukow who defended the Polish Westerplatte with the Polish eagle on his cap. There were lots of others alike at that time.

And this is the ordinary life of the Lukow Jewish citizens that I wanted to dedicate the second commemoration to. I thought that it should stand in the place of the main synagogue, in the street which before the war was called the Synagogue street. Synagogue is a Greek word which means “a meeting house” and therefore it is not only a sacred object, but primarily a center of the whole community. The synagogue of Lukow shared the fate of its community – there is no trace of it left. Instead, today there is an intersection of two streets. It was here where the heart of Jewish Lukow had beaten strongest. Right next to that place there were other, smaller houses of prayer. One of them, moreover the oldest, though heavily remodeled, has survived to this day. Before the war, apart from prayer halls it housed two schools, and social organizations as well as political parties had their offices there. During the occupation, the Judenrat was located there, and now it is the seat of the Social Welfare Centre. Near the synagogue there was also a mikvah, or a ritual bath, in which members of the Jewish community purified themselves before meeting with God present in the words of the Torah. Today the walls of this building are a part of the paries of a shopping center which is near here, in Staropijarska street. From here it is a few steps to Miedzyrzecka street which was full of Jewish service establishments, workshops, bakeries and shops. Not only Jews came to them because the town was not divided with a wall. The ghetto was built only later by Germans. And before the war it was a common space, even despite excesses of nationalist militias which in the 1930s broke the Jewish shopwindows and screamed: “Do not buy at Jews!”.

Yes, there were difficult periods in Polish-Jewish relations, but it does not rule out the fact that Lukow was home for all its citizens. The shoemaker Mojsze Sznejser, who survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and after the war settled in Legnica, a few years ago confessed in an interview to a journalist: “I miss Lukow, my town, where life was cool”. The monument, which we are unveiling today, has to testify about that life and to remind that Lukow was breathing with two lungs, that its past was varied and thereby rich and interesting. We cannot restore life of our neighbours and fellow citizens, their world cannot be raised from the ashes, we cannot go back in time. But we can, and we are doing this today, after decades of silence, restore memory, reach out to past generations, let them speak, provide them a proper place in a common history.

At this point it is impossible not to recall the appeal which the Committee for the Dialogue with Judaism of the Conference of the Polish Episcopate sent in January this year. It says, inter alia: “The tragic events of history made the Jewish space in Poland almost disappear. Although it was doomed in Holocaust during World War 2, it is an important component of both Jewish and Polish memory. Let this common memory be a call to care for the forgotten footsteps of the Polish-Jewish past.

Often we do not realize any longer that Jews, our elder brothers in faith, neighbours and fellow citizens, used to live, work and create for centuries in the close surroundings, on adjoining streets. (...) It is our duty as Christians to care for the salvation of the remembrance about them and to transfer it to our children and grandchildren.

We appeal to the priests - write the bishops - to take an initiative to commemorate a Jewish community in those places where it used to live, and to the believers and local authorities for help in this work. Do not shrug indifferently, saying: “It’s none of our business”. It is the duty of your conscience! Perhaps a former synagogue, a Jewish cemetery and graves of victims of the Holocaust were not quite forgotten and we can do something to restore them. Do not let those signs of life and faith vanish from the face of the earth. Or maybe we can specify names of our former Jewish fellow citizens? And if material evidence is gone, then let a plaque or a monument informing about the Jewish community which lived here be a sign of remembrance”.

Today’s ceremony is a response to the above-quoted Polish bishops appeal. It is a pity that both the plaque unveiled three years ago and this memorial here did not arise out of local initiatives. But it is not the time and place to talk about problems. The main thing is that the both commemorations has been realized and Lukow admits to their former inhabitants. And it would be much harder to achieve without the help of institutions such as the Regional Museum of Lukow and the Cultural Centre of Lukow, and people such as Mrs. Agnieszka Szaniawska, representing the Society of the Lukow District Friends who supported me in all the efforts to restore the remembrance of the Lukow Jewish community. I thank her and other persons, not mentioned here by name, favourable to this work. I also thank the Lukow County, represented by Mr. Janusz Koziol, the governor of the county, who always kindly refers to the idea of ​​commemoration of the history of the Jewish community in Lukow, as well as the Town of Lukow which has granted an area for the monument. The erection of the monument would not be possible if the Jewish Community of Warsaw did not provide the financial support and undertake it. I thank especially the president of the Community, Mrs. Anna Chipczynska who decided to build a commemoration in Lukow as soon as she became the head of the board of the Community.

I would also like to thank everyone here - the residents of Lukow and neighbouring places as well as the visitors from different parts of the country and abroad - for participating in today’s ceremony. I welcome especially warmly descendants of the Jews of Lukow who came from Israel, France, Denmark and Russia. Your presence here, on the land of your ancestors, is an evidence of the triumph of life over death, good over evil. We realize that it is not easy for you to arrive to a place where so many of your relatives lost their lives, where an unimaginable tragedy of your nation took place. However, I hope this trauma does not shadow completely the whole previous period, when your ancestors used to live happily, to work, study, pray, start families here. It was their piece of the world, it was a land Polin. How beautiful and significant is this legend, which reveals a deeper meaning of Hebrew name of Poland, so abovementioned “Polin”. When in the Middle Ages the people of Israel fled from their hostile countries in Western Europe and after wanderings reached the Vistula river, an angel appeared and said to them: “Po-lin”, which in Hebrew means: “Here rest”. And the biblical people stopped on the land which became its home for many centuries. And it would have continued, if the German genociders, drunk with the maleficent anti-Semitic ideology, had not come here to condemn the whole Jewish nation to death.

The name “Polin” was adopted by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, recently opened in Warsaw. Its core exhibition illustrates one thousand years of Jewish presence on the Polish soil extremely suggestively, interestingly and fairly. Today unveiled monument also clearly emphasizes that affirmative aspect of life. And let it remain as a sign for present and future generations. Let it connect those who passed away with those who live here, and those who come here to tread in the footsteps of their ancestors. Let it be a sign of peace.